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Garbage and minor street issues — not guns or gang violence — top the list of complaints, police say, when they meet with Chalkfarm residents.

It’s a far cry from years ago when discussion about the series of four towers, which went up in the 1970s near Jane St. and Wilson Ave. and house 4,000 residents, was dominated by crime and a community-police relationship best described as antagonistic.

And while the transformation has been by no stretch “miraculous,” 31 Division acting inspector Shaun Narine said the community is taking steps in the right direction.

“Guns and gangs and crime . . . those issues are there, but in a much more minor scale.”

More than 30 years ago, a teenage girl fell 24 storeys, her corpse violated by a resident before police arrived. In 2006, a man threw a grenade launcher over a balcony while police searched the apartment.

Another man came home to find his girlfriend strangled and scalded in the bathtub and police found a 13-year-old stabbed in the chest and throat in the elevators, surrounded by money in 2007. Only a month later, an 18-year-old had been stabbed to death in the hallways of 160 Chalkfarm Dr.

But floors below and more than six years later, rooms have been turned into a community hub, a boxing ring and a gym; far from simply wanting change, the residents are now making it happen.

The difference, says lifelong resident Godwin Larbi, 21, is as simple as a ‘Hey man, what’s up?’ from a fellow resident.

“In the past, if you had talked to some of the other individuals in the community, they’d give you a really dirty look like, ‘Why are you coming up to me?’ They weren’t as open,” he said.

On a chilly weekday evening, a gaggle of young kids comes out of the building, talking and teasing one another, shouting and waving their goodbyes to Adam Ali, a resident and children and youth program co-ordinator for Doorsteps Neighbourhood Services.

They’re part of the younger Chalkfarm generation; the one that Larbi, who now works with Doorsteps, calls lucky because they have options.

“When I was growing up, essentially you start hanging out with the wrong people and then you start doing really stupid things,” he said. “You don’t know what’s good and what’s bad; you just know what your friends are doing.”

But getting youth off the street and into the gym or into an after-school program made possible through fundraising and donated computers, is the next step in a revitalization process that started a little over three years ago with a seemingly simple task: picking up the trash and removing graffiti.

It was a revitalization kicked into gear by Greenwin Property Management, which took over the buildings in 2009.

“You wouldn’t recognize it today,” said spokesperson Jessica Green. “You’d walk in and you’d see people throwing their mattresses over the side of the building, they were throwing garbage over the balcony . . . and because it wasn’t being picked up they had no pride in where they live.”

Residents would graffiti the walls and Greenwin would immediately remove it, residents would graffiti again and Greenwin would remove it again. Over and over, Green said, “you keep cleaning it up until they stop doing it.”

The first revitalization year, which included renaming Chalkfarm “The Oaks,” was dedicated to cleaning up, changing locks, and changing rent rules to prevent cash payment, cutting back on trees and improving lighting in dark areas and bringing in more security.

But since 2011, it’s the social programming that has residents talking.

But a new program started last March is one of Tre Bowles’ favourites.

The GoodFit Battles was thought up by Ali, the Doorsteps’ co-ordinator and Alex Savva, founder of Toronto gym CircuitFIT and co-founder of the supplement company PharmaFreak, which also sponsors the battles.

Ali helps the kids train in the gym on an almost-daily basis, Savva drops in occasionally to help and once every six weeks or so they host a battle. It’s not about competing with each other so much as about improving personal scores.

“I just wanted to create something that’s fun,” Ali said. “The whole idea was to get youth and non-body builders from the community to work out in a fun atmosphere . . . and they’ve been very receptive to it in the community; it’s a packed house.”

When Savva drops in, the teens are quick to say hi and show off their lifts and he is all too happy to help. Using fitness to avoid drugs and street violence is something he said he grew up doing in Flemingdon Park.

“This is something I’m a product of,” he said. “I was either in the gym training or I was doing martial arts or I was playing sports instead of being on the streets and being mixed up in joining a gang.”

For 14-year-old Bowles, the gym does exactly that.

If you press him, he’ll talk about his neighbourhood, what it used to be like, how his mom still warns him about who he hangs around with — “it’s violent,” he shrugs — but if you let him dictate the conversation, he’ll tell you about training.

It’s a couple times a week in the small gym, operated with funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, on the first floor of 160 Chalkfarm. He lifts weights, spots for a friend, spends a few minutes joking around until Ali gently nudges him back to work and then, when asked, he flips a 100-lb. tire over and over to the edge of the room.

It’s his least favourite thing because “it’s pretty heavy,” but he has to do it: “I want to get huge. Like, really huge.”

The pursuit of muscle keeps him in the gym and off the streets, which is one of the program’s goals, and the GoodFit Battles give him an added spark, some incentive to put on his best performance when a whole slew of residents are out cheering him and around 30 other kids, building the sought-after sense of community.

“The community’s come full circle around creating a more positive atmosphere,” Ali said. “There’s a sense of pride now . . . it’s been quite peaceful.”

The hope is that it continues, Green said, and that Chalkfarm’s stigma will lessen.

“We can only hope that with time, even if the Oaks doesn’t stick, that Chalkfarm will become synonymous with a community hub where residents are proud to live and want to live.”

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